Are you working on a passion project in addition to your 9-to-5? What about building your own business? We understand how busy life can be when you’re trying to create something. That’s why many people, from all around the world, have chosen about.me to create a quick and simple, yet professional presentation of themselves.

Now, it’s your turn.

Follow these 10 easy steps to make your about.me page work for you so you can get back to working on what you care about.

You’ve got people to meet, things to do, places to go. And you’ve got a great story to tell about yourself. You can use your resume to tell others who you are, but that doesn’t capture the full picture of you. Maybe you’re a student just starting his career or an artist who would prefer to highlight her body of work instead of writing about it, or a realtor looking to show off his personality. That’s why we’ve created Backstory. So you can, in a more visual way, showcase who you are both professionally and personally.

Adding a Backstory to your page connects your resume, portfolio and about.me page to showcase your skills and aspirations. Through Backstory you can relate your story and more easily connect with others, because that’s how people connect, through stories. It’s rare that people get excited about lines on a resume. It’s just a listing of facts and dates. So what that you worked for a law firm for two summers? The interesting part is what’s never written on your resume. The picture of you traveling the world and the story of how your experience abroad inspired you to go into law even though you studied biology in college. With Backstory connected to your about.me page, it’s easy to make this story come alive, and connect with people on a personal level. This could lead to the door opening for professional opportunities including work collaborations, jobs and hopefully an expansion of your network.

And whether or not you already have an about.me page, it’s easy to set up a Backstory. Plus, you can customize it however you want and turn the different sections of your Backstory on for public view when you’re ready. Try it out, let us know how you like it, and as always, have fun with it. Because it is your story and this is your chance to share it.

Creative types view life as a journey of self-expression. Thus, creative professionals can find it hard to identify with platforms that don’t give their users the opportunity to express themselves visually. Creatives observe everything. Naturally, this is reflected in their professional careers: they pay excruciating attention to detail, ask big questions, and aren’t afraid to take risks. The about.me platform enables creative types to showcase their work without losing touch with their personality.

Brett Henley‘s page is a great example of how creatives can tell their story on our platform, and foster engagement amongst users. Since the last time we checked, it seems like Brett has updated his page a little bit and we can learn from both versions. In this post we’re going to dissect his page so that you too can create a compelling page, whether or not you consider yourself a creative type.

Keep it simple. This is your page, so naturally, you should be in the photo, but try to keep it simple, while still expressing some of your personal style. Imagine a camera crew following you around one day; what is the best image they can capture of you that visually tells your story?

Avoid the middle. This allows you to have space for your biography section, without cluttering your page.

Headline + Biography
Remember, you are more than your job title. Be creative in the way you write about yourself. Oftentimes when asked what we do in our careers we say, “Director of…but really I do X, Y, and Z.” Use this space as an arena to explain that X, Y, and Z, but don’t forget to tell your story not just professionally, but personally, too. On Brett’s page, instead of just writing “Co-Founder and Writer,” he showed his personality by using phrases like “Chief Smasher of B.S.” and “Instigate where needed.”

Whether you’re making a new about.me page, or updating your existing one, take a step back and view it as an empty canvas waiting for your creative expression. As always, if you need help or just want some feedback on your page, feel free to send us a tweet or visit our support page. Don’t forget to visit Brett‘s live page and send him a compliment!

Starting with this post, we’d like to try something new to keep everyone up to speed with the latest feature improvements as well as updates to the infrastructure plumbing at about.me. It’s a bit of a behind the scenes look into how our development process works and what we’re making happen each week. We typically do a release midweek, so look for our post around then.

What’s New

The team has been making lot of progress on a variety of projects. Below, we’ve included a information about some of the current endeavors.

Quick View

Quick View is now live on the site. Now we have a new way to view pages faster when browsing through Search results, the Popular page or the Featured page – it’s kinda slick, just click a thumbnail to open a quick view of the page. We’ve also made it easier to read the beginning of someone’s biography and quickly get a better understanding of that person. It’s the brainchild of Jeff brought to life by Daisy.

Add to Collections

When viewing an about.me page, you can use the ‘+’ button to add the page to one of your collections. Collections are one of our most popular features, it was time for it to have it’s own dedicated button and name. Our very own Jake made it happen – be sure to check out his wonderful Artists collection.

Notification Cleanup

This week we cleaned up the notifications in your navigation bar to make it simpler and easier to use. We’ve removed clutter and streamlined non-essential information. You can view all of your notifications from about.me/home, and all of your stats from about.me/stats.

Interaction Buttons

Compliments, adding to a Collection, emailing and following users all have improved screens. When you are interacting with someone’s page, there’s no need for extraneous information. The new function focuses on completing the action efficiently with maximum clarity. We think it’s more efficient, prettier, and an all around improvement to the experience.

Bug Fixes

We’ve fixed confusing text in a few places. In particular, we made it more clear when an action is completed by a person on our platform vs. about.me algorithms. For example, when someone compliments your page vs being added to one of our automated collections (ie, Twitter Friends, Facebook Friends) or being added to our Popular section.

Scrolling back through your about.me/home page is newly improved as well. Now you can smoothly view less-recent notifications my clicking the ‘more’ button. When you scroll down the page, you can be sure you haven’t missed something important.

Today we are thrilled to launch a new way to show off some of the content that makes you unique. Choose from your latest Soundcloud, Vimeo, YouTube or blog content to display in your bio box. Keep it fresh by updating when you have new sounds or video to share.

With the help of Soundcloud, you can embed public tracks, sets or even profiles right on your about.me page. In addition to Soundcloud, we have also added the ability to embed a video or recent blog links directly into your bio box. To include a Youtube or Vimeo video, add the video (not channel) URL. We want to see what you’re up to! Tweet your updated page with the hashtag #aboutme as we’ll be sharing and featuring the ones we see!

Not on Twitter? Just add your page in the comments below. We will choose the best pages with audio or video to highlight next week. Time to update your about.me!

We know there are lot of foodies on about.me. If you love exploring new cuisines, here are our recommendations for Apps to show off your favorites!

Forkly
Discover and share dining tastes with the Forkly app. Download Forkly to capture and share favorite dishes wherever you go. Search for and save things you’d like to try.

Key Ingredient
Our latest App, Key Ingredient is perfect for showing off your favorite recipes and bookmarking future ones to try. For foodies who like trying their cooking chops at home, Key Ingredient is for you!

FoursquareFoursquare helps you discover great restaurants everywhere, and learn the best tips on what to get (or what not to)! You can also learn about deals and discounts. Yum!

With so many ways to discover new tastes and show off your own, we hope you’re taking advantage of these great Apps. Let us know if we’re missing any!